A Profound Thought™ struck me when I recently re-read Thrond Sjursen Haukenæs’ Old Christmas Customs, and I have been reading myself into a rabbit hole ever since. I haven’t yet read enough to be able to unravel the question at the end of this post. I’m working on it, though I doubt the answer is out there.

We begin with Christmas in rural Norway, which by the beginning of the 20^th century, was typically celebrated the same way throughout the country. The baking was completed in the first half of December, the beer had been brewed after the barley harvest, and a goat, a lamb, or a pig was slaughtered close to Christmas Eve, so that the Christmas meal should consist of fresh meat.

Now, when we compare these customs with the way in which The Saga of Haakon the Good says the Norse folk marked their sacrifices, the similarities are quite interesting.

It was an old custom, that when there was to be sacrifice all the bondes should come to the spot where the temple stood and bring with them all that they required while the festival of the sacrifice lasted. To this festival all the men brought ale with them; and all kinds of cattle, as well as horses, were slaughtered, and all the blood that came from them was called “hlaut”, and the vessels in which it was collected were called hlaut-vessels. Hlaut-staves were made, like sprinkling brushes, with which the whole of the altars and the temple walls, both outside and inside, were sprinkled over, and also the people were sprinkled with the blood; but the flesh was boiled into savoury meat for those present.

Quite similar in a number of points.

Of course, the different ways in which a community can celebrate a holiday are limited, and feasting seems to be widespread, but here’s the interesting bit: the yearly slaughter on Norwegian farms took place in the autumn – after the now fat billy-goats came down again from the saeter. The meat from the autumn slaughter was preserved (salted, cured, dried, pickled) for the coming year; why should meat eaten at Christmas be fresh?

So is this custom of eating fresh meat at Christmas a bloody remnant of old Norse religions, which may have survived through to the beginning of the industrial period?

There was once upon a time a small boy who was on his way to church. As he passed through a clearing in the woods, he saw a fox lying asleep on a slab of glimmerite. The fox didn’t notice that the boy saw him.

“When I now take the life of this fox and sell its pelt,” said the boy, picking up a big stone, “then I’ll have some money. With that money I’ll buy some rye, and I’ll sow the rye on father’s strip of field back home. When then the church folk come, they’ll say: ‘Oh what fine rye that boy has!’ And I’ll say to them: ‘Don’t tramp on the rye!’ But they shan’t listen, so I’ll shout at them: ‘Say, don’t tramp on the rye!’ But still they shan’t listen, so I’ll scream at them as loudly as I can: ‘Don’t tramp on the rye, I said!’ And then they’ll listen.”

Now, at the boy’s screaming, the fox awoke and ran off into the forest, and so the boy didn’t get so much as a tuft of its hair.

No, it is better to take the opportunity that presents itself; one ought never to boast of what has not been accomplished, as they say.

– Gabriel Djurklou (1829–1904). Sagor och äfventyr (1885).

A girl served on a farm where there was a nisse. This nisse was a good-natured kind of creature and would gladly do everyone all possible manner of favours. Thus, for a long time he had given the girl a hand with little tasks about the kitchen so that she never had to wash pots or plates, but simply put them on the chimney breast in the evening and found them again clean in the morning. In gratitude to her little helper, she decided to honour him. One Christmas Eve, she put in the kitchen, next to the usual Christmas porridge, a small garment that would just about suit her favourite, as well as a mirror in which he could gaze upon his new finery. She hid herself, to see how he would behave when he – whose dress was otherwise very ragged – beheld the glory of his appearance. The evening came, and after completing his meal the nisse made his toilet. With the help of the mirror he regarded his figure with pleasure. Then, ignoring his usual work, he exclaimed at last: “No, now you are far too handsome to wash pots.” The girl never saw him again!

— Morgenbladet. Kristiania, 1823-04-01.
This is a very early written account of the nisse.

In the olden days it was customary in the settlements that everyone should go to a feast on Christmas Eve after they’d left church. No one should sit alone at home; either you’d invite guests yourself, or you’d be a guest at a neighbour’s or an acquaintance’s somewhere. But there was once a man at church who had expected to be invited to a feast, yet unfortunately, it turned out that no one thought of him or remembered to invite him. “Oh, that’s no bother,” thought the man, “if no one wants to invite me, then I shall invite others. I must certainly not go home alone.” So he went around looking for various acquaintances, asking them to be so kind as to come home with him, but things went no better than that everywhere he went, he arrived too late, and there was no one who could go with him.

The man was then both angry and sorrowful. He didn’t know what he should do, and as he walked and wandered around the churchyard, he happened to kick at an old skull which lay there at his feet. For it often happens when a new corpse is burried in an old cemetery, that an old head may be thrown up and come to lie in the upper soil. “Come on, then, since no one else will,” said the man, as soon as he saw the head.

The head then rose up from the ground and hovered around the man like a bird, and then it went home with the man from church. It stayed with him both at home and abroad, both at sea and on land. Wherever the man went, the head went too, hovering all around him.

Once, when the man was in the woods, he heard that the head laughed, and the man asked what it was laughing at, but received no answer.

Another time the man was in church, and things went the same way. It was quiet as the parson stood in the middle of his sermon in the pulpit, and the man heard the head laughing, and he asked it later what he had laughed at, but neither then was there any word or breath to be heard.

As time passed, as it is wont to do, summer came, then winter, and finally came Christmas again. When Christmas Eve arrived, the man went out in the twilight and painted crosses on the doors of his barn and storehouse and all the outhouses. And when he had put the last cross on the storehouse, the head laughed loudly.

“If only I were so wise that I knew what you were laughing at,” the man said.

Then the head began to speak, saying that they would soon be parted. The man said that there was much he had a mind to know, but first and foremost he wanted to know what the three laughs were supposed to mean.

“I’ll tell you,” replied the head. And then it said, “The first time I laughed was last spring, when you were cutting down a birch tree up in the woods. Then the sole of your shoe tore, and you knew no better than to dig around the foot of the birch and pull up a root to tie the shoe together so that it would stay on your foot until you got home. If you had known what I knew, then you would have dug a little deeper. For there was a chest beneath the root, so full of gold and silver that you could have bought the whole settlement and several settlements with it. And then you would have stopped wearing shoes that have to be together with birch roots.

“I began to laugh at how dull a man can be, who cannot see his fortune, even though it is so close that he need do no more than turn around, reach out his hand, and grasp hold of it.

“Then there was the second time, when you were at church this summer. Then again I saw something that you didn’t see. It was after the congregation had come in, and the parson had begun to speak. Then Old-Erik came, too, and sat out on the threshold; he had a big calfskin to write on. And he wrote up all the witches who were inside. And there were so many that that he did not have enough room on the skin for them all, and so he bit along the edge of the skin, to stretch it out until it was big enough. Just as he carried on so, and chewed and bit, the skin slipped out from between his teeth, so that there was a big chomp. Then I began to laugh – and you would have done so, too, had you seen and heard it.

“Then there was the third time I laughed, which was today when you put crosses on the walls. Then I laughed at the little trolls that began to flee from the mark of the cross. They looked like great flocks of rats and bats coming out of the buildings, and they hopped and crawled out through all the windows and all the gaps in the walls. You can imagine what a fine company it would have been that should taken refuge in your house for the holiday! But they flew across the ground, so eager they were to hurry, and run about, looking for shelter in another place. And now it’s free and peaceful in all of your buildings, so there’s no need to worry, neither for folk nor for cattle.

“Now I cannot take the time to talk to you any longer, for it is time for me to go to another place. And so my thanks for inviting me to your feast.”

Up in Gol in Hallingdal, shortly before the main road divides to Ål and Hemsedal, there is a great high mound that has a distinctive shape; it is called Hahaugen. Mound folk have always dwelt therein, and to this day people in the village hear music and songs from the mound.

But one Christmas Eve in the olden days, a peasant boy, Gudbrand Golberg, skied away to the mound, for he wanted to see how the mound folk observed Christmas. The mound opened up before him, and out came a girl with blonde hair; she wore a blue skirt, and was so beautiful that he had never seen her match. She offered him a large horn of a Christmas drink; but when he took the horn and glanced down into it, Gudbrand was afraid to drink, for the drink was like fire and flame. He poured it behind him, over his shoulder; it fizzed in the snow and hissed on his skis, for a drop that splashed burned a hole right through. With that he let himself go down the steep slopes with the horn, and the old troll screamed: “Well, just you wait until I put on my trotting trousers!”

Even though Gudbrand gave it everything, it wasn’t long before he heard the troll trotting – trotting so that he thought it must be just behind his skis, ready to grab him by his neck. But by then he wasn’t far from home, either.

Then the Golberg troll called out of the Golberg boulder: “Run on the tilled, and not on the trodden, Gudbrand!” He understood that to mean that he had to stick to the parts of the field that were furrowed, and where the soil had been blessed when the crop was planted; the troll would have no power there. Gudbrand obeyed, for here he knew every stone. The troll followed him along the edges of the fields and threatened and swore that if it did not recover the horn, it would trouble the folk of Golberg to the ninth generation. But then the sun rose, and the troll stood there as log and stone.